Research Information System
Emek Araştırma Dergisi, no.21, pp.129-150, 2022 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
This article is based on the descriptive analysis of the “fire brigade inventory
study” applied to municipal fire department in Turkey by mail. Then the Public
Administration Institute for Turkey and Middle East (TODAIE), where this study
was carried out, was closed in 2018 by the Presidential Decree and the Fire Bri-
gade Inventory Study, whose report has been just completed remained in state
of uncertainty, among other things. However, it can be claimed that the relati-
ve importance of our Fire Brigade Inventory study, whose analysis and report
writing was completed at the end of 2017, still continues; because there are no
national statistics on fire services in Turkey. In this article includes a descriptive
analysis of the data limited to 30 metropolitan cities. There are two reasons for
this preference: First, metropolitan municipalities provide the opportunity to
determine the current level of validity of 2016 data. Secondly, the research team
also conducted fieldwork in five metropolitan cities. We also obtained meaning-
ful qualitative data through the semi-structured interviews by conducting in Is-
tanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, and Bursa metropolitan fire departments in 2016.
This gave us important advantages in terms of making sense of the numerical
analyzes of the data compiled with the questionnaires.
In the questionnaire of our inventory study, the fire service capacity was cap-
tured in three dimensions. The first is infrastructure that covers number of sta-
tions, and of vehicles. The second dimension is about labourforce; under this
dimension, the number of personnel and personnel training were emphasized.
The last dimension is related to the production process of fire services; within
the scope of this dimension, the fire response method was emphasized, and the
workflow process and the methods of responding to different types of fire were
tried to be comprehended. In the first part of the questionnaire, there were 17
open-ended questions containing general information about the Fire Brigade.
The second part of the question paper includes questions for firefighters. The
third part was organized as an inventory by covering information about vehic-
le type, number, brand, model, and maintenance period of fire departments.
Analysis of fire service capacity carried out under three headings: “firefighting
vehicles and infrastructure”, “personnel capacity” and “fire response process”.
In order to make sense of the analysis, fire truck statistics were compared with
the vehicle standards in the 2006 Fire Brigade Regulation, and the number of
personnel and stations were compared with the data of the World Fire Statistics
Center (CTIF). The results of our inventory study, which are limited to metro-
politan fire departments, can be summarized as follows: First, the firefighting
infrastructure in Turkey is relatively inadequate compared to international in-
dicators and cannot even meet the minimum vehicle criteria specified by the
2006 Fire Brigade Regulation. Secondly, according to international firefighting
indicators, the number of firefighters per population in Turkey is relatively low.
Finally, even though metropolitan municipalities in Turkey have a standardized
workflow process in responding to urban fires, their knowledge and equipment
against chemical and industrial fires need to be strengthened. The fact that this
study shows beyond the numeric expressions, is that in the 21st century, which
is also called the ‘century of non-traditional threats’, the fire service has to be
seen as a high priority public service due to the population concentrated in the
cities and the characteristics of the urban architecture.